"The best books — like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games — can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us."

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"Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still dont like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. Its not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, theres no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it." - Author: Alan Bennett

"Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But theres a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabea al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God." - Author: John Green

"One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife." - Author: Robert T. Bakker

"As the floods of GodWash away sin cityThey say it was writtenIn the page of the LordBut I was lookingFor that great jazz noteThat destroyedThe walls of JerichoThe winds of fearWhip away the sicknessThe messages on the tabletWas valiumAs the planets formThat golden cross LordIll see you onThe holy cross roadsAfter all this timeTo believe in JesusAfter all those drugsI thought I was HimAfter all my lyingAnd a-cryingAnd my sufferingI aint good enoughI aint clean enoughTo be HimThe tribal warsBurning up the homelandThe fuel of evilIs raining from the skyThe sea of lavaFlowing down the mountainThe time will sleepUs sinners byHoly rollers rollGive generously nowPass the hubcap pleaseThank you Lord" - Author: Joe Strummer

"Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow." - Author: Donna Tartt

"... "England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesnt make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadnt been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitlers ambitions."~ nothing about its people and their steel will or courage, nothing about their history and legacy we share, nothing about the timbre of their values and virtues, just ".." - Author: Mitt Romney

"Haunting the library as a kid, reading poetry books when I was not reading bird books, I had been astonished at how often birds were mentioned in British poetry. Songsters like nightingales and Sky Larks appeared in literally dozens of works, going back beyond Shakespeare, back beyond Chaucer. Entire poems dedicated to such birds were written by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many lesser-known poets. I had run across half a dozen British poems just about Sky Larks; Thomas Hardy had even written a poem about Shelleys poem about the Sky Lark. The love of birds and of the English language were intermingled in British literary history.Somehow we Americans had failed to import this English love of birds along with the language, except in diluted form. But we had imported a few of the English birds themselves — along with birds from practically everywhere else." - Author: Kenn Kaufman

"After awhile, all the men wanted his opinion, and all the girls were in love with him. He made certain of it. Because he knew the best way to get what he wanted was to break down what made us strongest. And our friendships were what made us strong. He changed all that." - Author: Sarah Addison Allen